Tours of the CTBTO and Verification Exhibition in the margins of the NPT PrepCom 2007

The First Meeting in the Preparatory Committee to the 2010 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) takes place 30 April – 11 May 2007 in Vienna. The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty is a key instrument of the international nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament regime built around the NPT. In the margins of the NPT PrepCom meeting, the CTBTO organizes a number of events.

Tours of the new Operation Centre will be combined with the presentation “Putting an end to nuclear test explosions: 10 years of building the verification regime and the lessons learned from the 9 October 2006 event in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea". Executive Secretary Mr. Tibor Tóth together with technical experts will give an inside presentation of how the verification regime really works. The technologically state-of-the art Operations Centre functions as the single point of contact for all network operations. The over 200 stations located all over the world currently transmitting data to the International Data Centre in Vienna are monitored from the Centre.

The exhibition "Verifying the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty" will be on display during the full two weeks in the Austria Centre, Foyer A. On Thursday and Friday 3 to 4 May, experts from the CTBTO technical divisions will demonstrate how a seismic station works, how data is processed, and how an on-site inspection is conducted. A variety of technical equipment will be on display, the CTBTO movie “CTBT: For a Safer and More Secure World” will be shown at regular intervals, and visits to the radionuclide facility on the roof of the Vienna International Centre will be organized.